Making Sense of the World

Abstract

We establish the philosophical foundations of our approach to the study of political leadership. We begin with a general discussion of ontology and epistemology before presenting two basic philosophical positions, positivism and constructivism, demonstrating that they are incompatible with each other. We then focus on a third position, scientific realism, setting out how we understand the world on the basis of it. Within the framework of scientific realism, we identify with an approach that is consistent with the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. We present a summary of the pragmatic tradition, distinguishing between two variants of it, and identifying the implications for scientific inquiry of the Peircean version that we adopt.